


Color Theory

by racketghost



Series: Strange Moons [7]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley is a Mess (Good Omens), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Historical References, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sickfic, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), Sort Of, These tags give me anxiety, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 12:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: “You can turn back now, Crowley,” the angel is saying, his hands clasped in front of him.Why?Is the echo of his human tongue in his head, a slow, persistent voice drawing up from the darkness,did you finally realize that I’m a monster?
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Strange Moons [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1480787
Comments: 181
Kudos: 886





	Color Theory

**Author's Note:**

> I stumbled once upon this brief interview that Michael Sheen gave about how he wasn't quite sure what color his eyes are, how they change in the light. I couldn't get it out of my head.

you keep a lot of secrets,

and i keep none.

wish i could go back,

and keep some.

—_fireproof_, the national

London

July, 1918

In the morning they are green.

Green threaded with bits of silver, tiny hints of gold, like early sunlight on river water. He remembers how they glitter over cups of coffee, over morning newspapers and careful conversations. He has the memory of a time once, in Rome, when the prismatic light of early dawn crept through a tiny window and sculpted along a familiar profile, illuminated the green in eyes he always thought to be blue.

He blinks into the light streaming in through his dirty windows, makes a note to clean them.

Mornings have always been hard for him. It is difficult to pull himself from the nest of blankets and bedsheets, pillows, _warmth_. He isn’t quite sure why Aziraphale never got a hold of the whole sleeping bit— if it were up to Crowley he would sleep for decades, let the world keep spinning on without him.

_But then he’d move along without you_, he thinks, and rubs a weary hand over his face.

He should really be getting up, getting out. He hasn’t done much of anything the past few months and Hell is getting restless, if the notes under his doorstep are any indication. Not that he didn’t often take sabbaticals reserved solely for sleeping— but this is stretching it, even for him.

It’s much easier to curl around his pillow, cup his hands around it like a lover, press his face into the cool softness— remember what it felt like, that one time, to hold Aziraphale to his chest, bury his nose into a warm neck.

_I know you’re in London, why haven’t you come looking for me yet?_

He often thinks of his body as something wild, unable to control— feral and untamed— the way his throat tightens up in invisible want, the way his molars grind together, his stomach twists. He has no control over the violent heaving of his body, how it warps like a floor with the water of emotion, twists him into knots. He thinks about cracking open his ribs, exorcising his heart, filling the cavity with grave dirt.

_Will I ever not miss you_? he wonders, finding it hard to breathe, and opens his eyes to look out his window.

The sky outside is bright and warm, and filters through the leaves of a house fern by his window. He watches the light oscillate through the foliage, waltzing in and out with the clouds, green threaded with bits of silver, tiny hints of gold. 

* * *

“—Don’t.”

A square hand is pushing unceremoniously into his chest. Crowley looks down at it— the neat fingernails, the gold-dust hair, the fading freckles— and wonders if it can feel the mad beating of his heart through his jacket.

“Why not?” He asks, and looks up into his face.

The angel looks pale and maybe a bit damp, his white hair mussed and disorderly. Crowley swallows around the lump in his throat, wonders at how hard the angel has been working.

“I can’t risk you getting sick,” Aziraphale says, and glances behind him.

Crowley follows his gaze but can’t look away from his profile, the up-turned nose, the tiny mouth.

“For Christ’s sake, I won’t get sick,” he starts, and then lower, “I’m a demon I can’t get sick.”

“You might—“

“_You_ haven’t. We’re from the same stock.”

“Will you—“ Aziraphale stops, clenching his jaw, clearly dismayed and maybe a little overwhelmed at Crowley showing up here like this, unannounced, “_Please_, just _listen_ to me.”

“Then let’s go some place else.”

“I can’t, I’m afraid— too much to do.”

“You’ll come back out?” He asks, trying so hard not to sound desperate and knowing that he’s failing. He always fails.

“Yes,” he replies.

“Okay,” Crowley says, biting off the end of his sentence, not allowing himself to say _angel_, not yet, “I’ll wait.”

Aziraphale takes his hand away but the weight of it echoes there, pulses, and Crowley tries not to think about how they had an entire conversation with the angel’s hand over his heart.

“Good,” Aziraphale says, “I’ll be just a moment.”

And as he turns back inside the infirmary Crowley catches a glimpse of the chaos beyond its doors— lines of men coughing weakly on hospital cots, sweating on makeshift gurneys, nurses and doctors in their white coats hustling between them.

There is an idea of the Spanish flu, a flat rumor spread by word of mouth and various newspapers. But it is another thing entirely to see it in plain view— under electrical lighting and in full color. It has been ravaging across much of the developed world, Crowley knows, despite what the papers say— putting men who would otherwise have been in the trenches in the hospitals instead. But he did not understand the scope of it— not entirely, not with the newspapers downplaying the sweeping terror of it all, the way it made your skin weep sweat despite the cold, the way it made your muscles bleat in wearied agony.

Aziraphale’s absence suddenly makes sense.

He leans against the brick wall behind him, in this dark alley between buildings, his ears now strangely tuned to the sound of the men in the hospital coughing, the murmur of doctors and the musical clinking of glass vials, metal instruments.

It is more than a few minutes before the door opens again and Aziraphale steps out, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his collar uncharacteristically unbuttoned, bow tie missing. He pushes a hand through his hair, attempting to smooth the errant curls, the motion pulling open his jacket.

“I appreciate you waiting outside,” he says, not quite meeting his eyes, “it’s been a difficult few months.”

“It has,” Crowley agrees, stuffing his hands into his pockets, “May I?” He asks, nodding at the carton of cigarettes tucked into Aziraphale’s waistcoat.

“Oh,” he says, as if he didn’t realize they were there, “of course.”

“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Crowley says wryly, pulling one from the carton.

“I don’t. But we are beginning to amass a pile of them from the soldiers who… you know,” Aziraphale’s hands are doing a strange locking together, twisting, unlocking motion over and over again, his eyes fixated on the action, a Möbius strip of nervous movement.

Crowley hesitates, the cigarette between his teeth, hands cupped up to light it. He glances up at Aziraphale, at his weary silence.

He swallows, pulls the cigarette from his lips, “listen— Aziraphale.”

And if Aziraphale looks up at the curious lack of nickname Crowley decides not to dwell on it too much, to make at least something of an attempt to not read into things so much anymore.

“I’ll take the next set. No need to flip for it. In… In France or wherever.”

He fidgets from left to right, shifting his weight, looking over the angel’s shoulder.

The air falls abruptly out of Aziraphale’s chest.

“Oh, are you certain?” He glances back to the infirmary ward behind him, “that would— it would certainly help—“

Crowley waves an anxious hand, leaning back into the wall, “yes. Don’t mention it. Just give me the details and I’ll be out of your hair.”

There is something confused and worried about the way Aziraphale’s eyes drop, his lips close, like he was expecting something different out of this impromptu conversation.

“I’m to help the Allies move a few infantry units into the city of Amiens without detection,” he starts.

“Which ones?” Crowley asks, taking in a deep inhale of his smoke, somehow managing to look everywhere but Aziraphale’s face.

“The Canadian Corps. They’ve got Germans watching them from every angle and there weren’t details on the _how_—“

“Leave it to me,” he interrupts, pushing off from the wall, “is that all?”

Aziraphale grasps his hands in front of him, looks down at his thumbs rubbing nervous circles over each other.

“I suppose it is,” he mutters, uncertain.

“Alright then,” Crowley says, flicking away the growing ash pile on the end of his cigarette. He tries not to look at the way Aziraphale’s wrists appear smaller than they did in Kobarid, at the way the buttons on his vest no longer strain when he inhales. He pushes his glasses up higher on his nose and sucks on the cigarette in between his teeth, glad at least that he can hide under the dark lenses, sneak glances without noticing.

“I’ll let you know how it goes,” he says around the cigarette, “ciao.”

He exhales a stream of smoke that was considerably more shaky than he intended, and then pushes past Aziraphale’s shoulder and out into the night beyond him.

He can feel the angel’s eyes on him as he exits, and he has never been more aware of how little control he has over his own legs: how they pick their own spot on the earth to land and stick to it against his will and all the laws of physics.

There is the solid brick wall of the hospital to his left, the wall of the building that he hopes Aziraphale has already reentered. As soon as he passes it he folds himself against it, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth and flicking it urgently to the ground, his teeth already biting into his bottom lip. He closes his eyes and leans against the brick, pressing his palms to his face, the mortar digging into the back of his head.

It is hard to breathe here— hard to breathe with Aziraphale looking thin and confused and tired, hard to breathe with Crowley wanting nothing more than to run inside that hospital and find the angel, push him up against one of those white walls and make those lips say his name again.

He inhales, exhales, each breath more shaky than the last. He thinks of Aziraphale on the floor of that little white tent in the hills— how it felt to hear the angel call him _darling_.

He takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes, trying to hold fast to that feeling again— that feeling that he couldn’t quite put a name on, _cherished_ maybe, or even just _warm_. But those memories have the lifespans of mayflies, and after enough replaying, enough endless loops of the same recollection— they begin to fray. He forgets if the angel called him darling once or twice, or if he even said it at all. He forgets whether Aziraphale covered him with a blanket and kissed his nose, or if those things are mere figments of an overactive mind.

His eyes roll up to the night sky, to the stars and the full moon and the lingering cloud cover.

“Stop testing me,” he breathes. The embers of his cigarette are glowing defiantly on the ground in front of him and he grinds them out with his heel.

“I’ve already failed,” and pushes off the wall, out into the night.

* * *

Northern France, a few weeks later

Major General Arthur Currie is, by Crowley’s estimation, the kind of human that the earth needs a lot more of.

“You mean to tell me,” the man starts, slowly, “that you have destroyed multiple German communication towers from Amiens to Ypres without being caught?”

Sir Arthur Currie is tall, taller perhaps than Crowley, although it is difficult to tell with him sitting down.

“Yes.”

“And you said you are—“

“British intelligence,” Crowley pauses, then adds, “sir.”

“So,” he tents his fingers together and leans back in his chair, “let me get this straight. You refuse to tell me your name and rank, you somehow find your way into my tent, give me the unsolicited advice to _bluff the Germans_, and now you tell me you have destroyed multiple communication lines against the Central powers.”

Crowley rocks back on his heels, nonplussed.

“If you send a wireless unit, a battalion or two, maybe a casualty collection station back to Flanders they’ll assume that the entire Canadian unit is going there as well.”

_Especially when I make the German scouts believe they’ve watched a whole army move north._

He allows himself the kind of smile one only gives when they know they’re right, “the road to Amiens will be clear.”

“That would be a miracle,” he mutters.

“I know,” Crowley replies.

The Canadian Major General is silent for a long while, staring somewhere between Crowley’s eyes, trying to get a read on this stranger who comes bearing gifts. He finally leans forward in his chair again, flattening his hands on out the desk in front of him.

“I haven’t heard anything about their comm towers being down.”

“_Yet_,” Crowley says, “It’s all very recent.”

“But you were responsible for it?”

“I may have been in the area when five telegraph towers and eleven radio stations all mysteriously caught fire, yes. And wouldn’t you know it? Just the other day I found about thirty miles of terribly segmented German telephone wire in my possession.”

Crowley digs into the bag that is slung across his shoulders and pulls out a carefully twined circle of black wire, mostly covered in dried mud.

“Here’s some of it,” he says, and sets it on Arthur’s desk, “in case you don’t believe me.”

Arthur has a long, steady look about his face, something cool and unruffled about the way he regards life. It is obvious to Crowley that he is not the type to make rash decisions, that he has seen enough of war to know the cost of a human life. But this knowledge dropped in his lap is a gift, and the Allies were in a good position to use it. He finally looks up, and into Crowley’s eyes.

“Alright,” he says, “You have my attention.”

* * *

August, 1918

_God_, he thinks, laying on his belly, _the things I do for you._

And he doesn’t understand it, not quite, why he always had to make massive undertakings of the miracles he was covering, why he always had to make things so dramatic, so _big_.

_It’s not like it will impress him. Stop trying to impress him_.

He is lying on his stomach next to a rail line, digging into the coarse stones there, seeking out a buried telephone wire.

_They’re still performing fucking Hamlet. You could’ve just given it a decent run, let Twelfth Night really catch on. But no, had to go big with that one._

He shifts a bit, somehow enjoying the way the stones rub into his skin, remembering earlier days, when the most he had to do was watch a fussy angel sample the different fruits in Eden, wonder at what new absurdities would come out of Adam’s mouth.

_I like when our work intersects_, he thinks, grabbing onto the buried line, _the way my fucking things up helps out your making things easy. _He yanks them up through the earth, _almost like we’re working together instead of against—_

It is late enough at night, or rather, early enough in the morning that he is, for the most part, alone.

There are a handful of German soldiers languidly eyeing the far end of the tracks, their night watch punctuated by deep yawns. They were friendly enough and tired enough to easily convince that he was a communications engineer, with his German uniform and German haircut, here to repair a telephone line— even if Crowley had never quite mastered the German tongue.

_Not like you_, he thinks, his hands busy with the bundle of thick copper wires.

_You were always a quick study. How many languages do you know? You know I mastered early Sumer and Egyptian and then I just started to not care so much. I stopped reading the poetry. But you never stopped. You still haven’t stopped._

He splices apart the wires, pulling them out of their insulating jackets.

The sun has not yet risen, but there’s the hope of it along the sharp edge of horizon, a thin light shrouded under a thick coverlet of fog. It is eerily quiet here, at the front of what will come to be the German lines, in the center of the town of Amiens.

_You are the cleverest person I know, _he thinks, replaying memories in his head: Aziraphale in Egypt, showing him early paper, emanating pride, then again in Alexandria, staring up in wonder at the shelves stuffed with scrolls, in Manchester, lit by gas lamps in a warm wood-lined library.

He isn’t sure when it will ever stop, _if _it will ever stop— the swelling of what he is sure is a black and shriveled heart, a tiny broken thing that beats and beats and beats like mad when he thinks about the angel, of all their days and nights together, the opposing sides of a coin spinning through history.

_I hope you’re okay,_ he thinks, remembering their last conversation, _I hope you aren’t working too hard, too long. I hope you are remembering to eat, to rest, to find some time to bury yourself in those books again._

He can hear gravel crunching under boots, the cadence of men walking and the way that their weight echoes up from the chest of the earth. He glances behind him, but the fog is so dense that he can no longer see the German night watchmen at their post, can only see the shifting specters of fog moving lazily through the darkness, through the promise of day-break and the shine of electric arc-lights.

He shoves the frayed wires back underground, burying his handiwork, and then glances forward— to see a pair of the browning army-issued boots of the British military.

_Fuck_.

He looks up, just in time to see the butt of a rifle coming down onto his head.

* * *

At midday, they’re blue.

The limitless blue of a cloudless summer sky, without the threat of early sunsets, of autumn winds. They are the kind of blue that says, _stay with me where the ocean meets the earth,_ and, _let’s never go home_, and, _we can make this day an eternity, live here forever._

He has a good memory of a place at the edge of the continent once, where the jutting edge of the earth gave herself over to the sea, not minding how it carved chunks from her year after year. They had sat around a tide pool and sunbathed like reptilian animals then, listening to the familiar heartbeat of ocean water pumping in and pumping out; had spent the mid-day sun relearning their common tongue, putting flesh on the bones of their intimacy.

Crowley opens his eyes, breathes, realizes that he has a magnificent headache, an encyclopedia of aches and pains, a strange chill beneath his clothes. He closes his eyes, and can see the memory of that day again, the way the sunlight threw Aziraphale’s shadow onto the rocks behind him, how his ankles looked painted in seawater. He opens them again and can see that he is in a darkened cell— not that it matters much to his vision— his wrists bound behind him.

He looks down at his German uniform and groans.

_Of all the fucking times I could’ve been captured it had to be _now_?_

He leans his head back into the wall behind him.

_I can’t even snap my fingers. This might take an actual miracle to get out of here._

He can hear men walking around outside, probably standing guard, and the warm smell of dirt in the sunshine. It is probably around noon, by his estimation, judging from the long slits of bright light filtering between the bars near the roof of… whatever he is inside. It has a wooden floor with scattered bits of hay about it. Probably a train car for transporting horses. He sniffs. _Definitely_ horses.

It is with a bit of a start that he realizes that his glasses are missing. He knows that they were probably shattered by the rifle that had collided with his face, but the knowledge doesn’t do much to quell the fear of a guard walking in and getting a good look at his eyes.

_I could just_— he shifts himself back and forth on his sitting bones, knowing how easy it would be slide himself down into his favorite shape, leave these restraints around his wrists and ankles on the floor. 

_I shouldn’t_, he thinks, knowing how hard it could be to turn back. That fear never really left him— for all that he enjoyed his lack of limbs and lack of responsibilities, there was always the enduring doubt that he wouldn’t be able to find his human shape again, that whatever it was that made him Crowley wouldn’t allow itself to be poured back into human skin, allow the pain that came along with wearing it.

_No where to slither to anyway,_ he thinks, scanning the interior of the train car. It is well sealed, only one sliding door that was very clearly locked from the exterior, nothing on the walls.

Nothing on the walls save for a poster at the far end of the car, under what would be an invisible layer of blackness were it not for his reptilian eyes.

“Keep your mouth shut,” he reads, _well isn’t that appropriate_.

His wrists are beginning to ache— they were tied together much more tightly than he really thought necessary. After all, he’d been without a weapon when he’d been taken.

_Maybe I could do it. Just for a bit— just to get my hands free_.

He shifts against the wall of the car, _I could change right back_—

He can feel his bones shifting anyway, despite himself— the molecules in his blood giving themselves the approval he was too apprehensive to voice— can feel the unpleasant lengthening of a spine, the breaking down of a pelvis, ligaments and cartilage stretching. He had forgotten how uncomfortable it is to transmogrify himself, for all he has not done it for a few centuries.

_Just like riding a horse_, he thinks, scales breaking through his skin, _because that fucking sucks too_.

He is, at last, a great coiled serpent, his bindings buried somewhere under the red of his belly.

_Okay,_ he thinks, _time to go back now_.

But nothing happens. There is a pleasant heavy fog in his mind, a warm contentedness. It is much easier, he knows, to stay a snake— to lie on his belly all day and sleep, find a golden patch of sunshine and enjoy its warmth, let himself be beholden to the outside temperature, sped up, slowed down.

He weaves his way over to the patch of sunlight that is just beginning to paint the wooden floor and curls into it.

Through the tiny barred window at the top of the car he can see a cut of bleached blue sky, like the color of cornflowers, cloudless and divine. He tightens around himself, and can feel his own heartbeat against his scales, pumping in and pumping out, like the breath of the ocean, a limitless blue.

* * *

Aziraphale couldn’t say for sure exactly _when_ he began to worry. He is, by nature, an anxious thing, so it is difficult to separate the worry he felt for Crowley from the myriad other worries he contains, the thread-nest ofconstant uncertainty.

So it was with a start one morning, when he hadn’t heard from Crowley in over two months, that he realized something had gone wrong.

_Leave it to me_.

He wouldn’t admit it to himself, not yet, that he had been replaying their last conversation in his head on an endless loop, trying to parse out any hidden meanings Crowley had laced his words with.

_What are you doing?_ He thinks, smoothing his hands down the front of his jacket, _I don’t see you for months and then you show up unannounced at the hospital of all places and offer to go to France? And now you’re just… gone?_

He heard much in the way of rumors from the men convalescing, many of them straight from the front lines— where the flu was working its way through the trenches, infecting those who deigned to survive artillery shells, bayonet surges, gunfire. Something had gone terribly _right_ for the Allies, finally, a siege at Amiens under the cover of fog and the capture of so many German soldiers.

_So the miracle worked_, he thinks.

He tries to busy himself with organizing the medical supplies in the back room of the recovery wing, but cleaning has never been his strong suit. So when he hears two men talking to their recovering friend about news from the front lines he can’t help the way he focuses on their conversation, the way his hands hover in mid-air, forgetting their task of placing vials on a shelf.

“Brocton is overflowing, they’re running out of room.”

“It doesn’t help that they’re starting a zoo down there.”

“A zoo?”

“One of the POWs was being held in an old train car that had some sort of python in it—“

Aziraphale freezes, nearly dropping a tray of syringes.

“—The guy got _eaten_—“

“Went in there that night and he was just _gone_—“

“—They got in so much trouble for not clearing the car out—“

“Wait— how did a python get in a train car?”

“No idea.”

“He was _eaten_!”

“I would rather be back on the front lines than eaten by a snake—“

_“—_Did the guy not scream while he was being eaten? How does no one hear that?”

“Honestly, I think one of the guards had something to do with it.”

“—Excuse me,” Aziraphale steps out from behind the shelves he is most definitely not organizing, “Did… did you say they found a snake? In a POW camp?”

The three young men— _boys_, really, Aziraphale thinks— all turn to look at him.

“Yeah, in the Brocton camp up in Staffordshire.”

“Not just a snake, it’s _huge_—“

“It’s giant. Like ten feet long.”

“—And _black_.”

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale says, suddenly sweating, “Erm, thank you.”

He is so consumed by worriment that he doesn’t even bother saying goodbye, just walks into the backroom, grabs the largest rucksack he can find, and pushes his way out the back door.

Aziraphale hasn’t used profanity in centuries, not since that time he accidentally fried Crowley with a healing touch. The demon hadn’t heard it, thankfully, too busy wailing into his hands and curling into a ball to hear much of anything— but Aziraphale had been so embarrassed by his slip-up that he vowed to never say it again unless the situation really merited it.

And right now the situation is getting fretfully close to really meriting it.

He doesn’t stop walking until he reaches the train station, buys a roundtrip ticket, and finds himself swaying slightly over his seat. He needs time to think, and he has a three-hour commute to figure out exactly what he is going to do.

* * *

“You’ll have to wait.”

Aziraphale nods, polite as always, and finds a wooden bench to perch on.

There is a soldier next to him, looking decidedly rough about the edges.

“Hey, man, you got a smoke?”

_Americans,_ he thinks.

Aziraphale glances at him out of the corner of his eye and pulls out the pack that has been stuffed in his pocket the last few months. A remnant of his last conversation with Crowley.

“Thanks, this is the kind I smoke too— You like the American stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t smoke,” Aziraphale says.

There is the strike of a match, the distinct smell of sulphur. Aziraphale closes his eyes and swallows, tries not to think about how the smell of a match summons up visions of eyes the color of citrine, a titian-red tumble of hair.

“You just cart them around for people to bum them off you?”

Aziraphale parts his lips, thinks of Crowley’s long fingers and the hellfire that he pulled up between them, thinks of those golden eye-lashes illuminating under the light of the flame, the way the black slits of his pupils dilate when he says his name.

“Something like that,” he murmurs, his heart suddenly too loud in his chest.

He turns his head and can see the man who told him to wait talking to a soldier.

“Animal control, Private Edwards will take you where you need to go.”

Aziraphale nods and follows him, through the maze of barbed-wire fences and transitory barracks, to a rail car that has been disconnected and left to stand in the back of the camp.

“It’s in there,” the soldier nods, “a few of us have tried to get it out but it’s pretty hostile.”

“Don’t worry,” Aziraphale says, and smiles at the man, “I’m used to him.”

He doesn’t stop to think about what he’s said, too filled with a strange nervous excitement.

He unlatches the simple mechanism and slides open the door, stepping inside— to find a black, cold room dusted with hay. Something in his heart twists at the sight— thinking of Crowley here, of all places: cold, alone, in the dark with no food, no water—

His eyes adjust and there in the corner, coiled into a tight ball is a magnificent serpent, black as night.

“Crowley?” He whispers, unsure if he is sleeping.

There is the great flexing of muscle, of oily black scales shifting in the dim light, and then a small, wedge-shaped head emerges from the center of himself, familiar golden eyes shining in the dark.

_“Crowley_,” he says again, and kneels on the floor.

He is sure that the young man outside is most likely staring at him in confused wonderment, is probably thinking that this animal control officer has gone stark-raving mad— but not particularly caring as Crowley, the great serpent of Eden, comes slithering up to him across the floor.

“Poor dear, what are you _doing_ you ridiculous demon?” He murmurs, lowering the bag slung across his chest down to the floor.

“Let’s get you out of here, yes?” He says, and a pink forked tongue comes out in what he hopes is agreement.

The soldiers were clearly not in jest when the said the snake was huge— Crowley barely fit inside the large bag he brought, his head peeking out nearly over the edge.

“Stay down, okay? They think I’m an animal control officer.”

The pink tongue darts out again, those golden eyes staring at him, something intelligent there, bemused even.

“Oh hush, it’s a good cover and you know it.”

He isn’t quite sure how well Crowley understands human speech like this— _if_ he understands human speech.

“It’s… it’s in the _bag_?” Private Edwards looks scandalized.

“He is, yes,” Aziraphale says, “now if you’d kindly escort me to the exit I would be much obliged.”

“But it’s… dangerous. Isn’t it?”

There is a soft hissing from the bag, and Aziraphale bumps his hip into it in warning.

“He’s fine. Just a bit tetchy, I’d bet. Hungry perhaps.”

There’s another hiss, softer this time.

The young man looks suitably horrified at that last statement, turning sharply on his heel and leading him, rather quickly, back to the entrance.

“Let’s go home, my dear,” he says, to those familiar golden eyes, and reaches down to smudge a thumb across his head.

* * *

Aziraphale is trying very hard not to think about why Crowley is still a snake.

They had plenty of time alone— outside the gates of the camp, on the walk from the city to the train station, even then— on the station platform, early as they were, before anyone had come to queue up beside them.

Was he sick? Frightened? He had seen him in his snake form only a few times— in distant history— mostly around the time when humans worshipped such creatures and Crowley could find himself raised to godhood in their eyes.

The train ride home is quiet. Many of the passengers are asleep, thankfully, the distant lights of passing cities illuminating faces and bodies for a few stilted seconds, then dipping them back into shadow.

He has kept the bag with its precious cargo close to him, under his arm, between his body and the window. It’s cold against the metal, he knows, but he cannot risk someone walking by and taking a peek into the rucksack, even as dark as it is.

The bundle has not moved for what feels like hours, slowed down by the cold maybe, or just sheer exhaustion. He does not know whether holding such a shape is difficult, if it requires a certain flex of power to sustain— he knows that it takes a bit of effort to lock his wings away in the firmament, but that once they are there he could safely forget about them, live as they don’t exist.

He dips a hand inside the rucksack, keeping watch out of the corner of his eye, to smooth his fingers against the heavy scales.

There is an incredible flex of muscle under his fingertips, a heavy strength, as the wriggling mass of Crowley spins around, rotating himself so that his head can peer out of the bag.

“Hello,” Aziraphale says softly, “are you okay?”

The pink tongue darts out again, the yellow eyes unblinking.

“I know, it’s cold. But we will be home soon,” he promises, understanding that _home_ in the abstract— a place where they can be together, whether it is his bookshop or Crowley’s flat or a tent in the hills of Austria-Hungary, a flat rock on the coast of Spain.

The head lowers, slowly, until it is resting on his thigh. Aziraphale glances around, aware that large pythons are not generally allowed on trains.

He lifts his hand and then rests it, slowly, on top of the great beady head, his thumb rubbing circles into the smooth scales.

“Try to sleep,” he whispers, wondering why it is so easy to show affection to Crowley when he is wearing this skin and not his human one.

* * *

“Crowley.”

He is having a very pleasant dream— the kind of dream you didn’t want to wake up from. A dream where he is lying in Aziraphale’s bed, naked, tangled in the sheets while his lover speaks his name.

“_Crowley_.”

The name calling is getting to be a bit much, though, a bit loud.

“Wake up, dear. Oh, or are you already awake? You know I can never quite tell.”

He opens his retinas, allows the warm glow of incandescent light to come streaming in through his eyes. If he could blink, he would be. Blinking at the sight of Aziraphale, his familiar coat off and hanging on a hook in the corner of the room, the angel hovering somewhere above him.

He has been sleeping for what feels like days, lulled into a drifting slumber by the rhythmic motion of a train and darkness, the cold air of an early winter making the blood push slowly through his veins.

He feels sluggish, _cold_.

His thoughts move around a bit differently in this brain. He is slower to process certain things, quicker at others. He knows, for instance, that Aziraphale began emitting an enthralling heat, much moreso than usual, when he had laid his head into his lap. He knows, also, that the smell of this room he is in— Aziraphale’s bedroom— is at once familiar and exhilarating, comforting and new. He can see the white honeycombed tile of the bathroom in the dark, and even as a snake the sight speeds up the beating of his heart.

“You can turn back now, Crowley,” the angel is saying, his hands clasped in front of him.

_Why_? Is the echo of his human tongue in his head, a slow, persistent voice drawing up from the darkness, _did you finally realize that I’m a monster?_

“I’m getting worried,” he starts, reaching out a tentative hand, resting it uneasily on his head, “is something wrong?”

A full body heat blossoms through him at the touch, slaking away a chill he can’t remember acquiring.

He flicks his tongue out, tastes the air. He can taste that Aziraphale has bathed recently, can taste that familiar blue bottle in his curls, the lingering softness of lilacs. He can taste the worn cotton of his clothes and the pleasant dust of old books, the persistent top-note of bread and vanilla, a base-note of something inexplicably like sunshine.

It is inescapable, even in this form, the way he reacts to the angel— the way he twists around a vacancy he can never remember being without, a black-hole in the center of his chest.

“Come back to me, darling,” He is murmuring, and Crowley realizes, slowly, that he _can’t_.

Snakes do not panic. They cannot. Such a thing is not permitted by their DNA, by the cold intelligence of their design. But he feels something— something unfamiliar and dark, an instinctive terror in the vertebrae of his spine.

He curls up around himself, protecting the soft parts, squeezing against the hole that aches where a human heart would be.

“Come back,” Aziraphale is whispering, and then there are hands on him, smoothing down the scales of his long back.

He is cold. And the angel’s hands on him remind him of how cold he is, how it has felt like _years_ since their sunny day on a rock in Spain.

_He likes flamingos_, he thinks drowsily.

“It’s okay,” Aziraphale is saying, “you’re safe here.”

He has an abrupt memory of bonfires at the edge of winter, incantations in the dark. Early humans used to believe that words held magic abilities. That a string of syllables in the right order could summon up spirits from the Earth, that power could be harnessed between the letters.

“You know, you are a very handsome serpent.”

There are fingers running over the places where a human ear might be, a neck, a shoulder.

“Such a deep glossy black.”

His spine, his hips, his thighs.

“You’re much larger and more intimidating than I remember.”

He believes that those early humans must’ve been right about at least something. He believes it because Aziraphale’s words have the ability to direct the currents in his bloodstream, put the pieces of him back together.

“And such beautiful eyes.”

And if that isn’t magic he doesn’t know what is.

He tastes the air once more, just to remember what lilacs feel like on his tongue— and then his bones are snapping, elongating, like the world’s worst growing pains.

The scales slip into his skin and he suddenly has legs again, arms, a torso with a beating heart. He realizes that his eyes are closed and he opens them, to find himself on Aziraphale’s bed, staring at that bathroom where so much has happened— with his head in the angel’s lap.

“_Crowley_,” the angel is whispering, “Oh, my dear I was so worried—“

“Angel,” he gasps, getting accustomed to his human throat, “I’m… I’m _freezing_.”

He pulls his legs up into his chest, gripped by a terrible wracking chill.

Aziraphale’s hands are on him— his neck, his forehead, pushing back his hair.

“Oh dear.”

He feels like the world is moving faster than he is used to— suddenly painted in a fuller spectrum of colors. He is wearing the same dirty military jacket in the style of the German army, probably with a handful of cut telephone wire still in his pocket.

“You feel very hot—“

“No,” he interrupts, his teeth chattering, “I’m _cold_.”

“Well yes, I do imagine you are, but you probably have a fever.”

“I can’t have a fever I’m a demon. I—“ he stops speaking and lets the persistent jawing his of mouth subside, “I’m _fireproof_.”

“But apparently not influenza proof.”

He closes his eyes against what seems to be much too bright of a light in this bedroom, wraps his arms around his torso.

“How do I make it stop?”

“The _flu_?”

“Yes the flu, what else would I mean?”

He can feel Aziraphale rubbing something, probably his forehead, in distress.

“It doesn’t quite work like that— You’re going to have to rest. And drink a lot of fluids. And I do believe that you’re going to have a terrible bruise over your right eye.”

“I’m good at resting,” he says. His mind felt very tired and very foggy and maybe even a bit of what humans called_ loopy_.

“Of course you are,” Aziraphale is saying, but Crowley can’t quite hear it because the angel’s hands are petting gently at his face, along the edges of what he is certain will become a black eye.

“We should get you out of those clothes,” he’s murmuring, and if it weren’t for the strange body aches grounding him to reality he’d be certain he is hallucinating.

“You can use my bathroom— get clean if you want.”

Crowley can feel himself nod, acutely aware that his head is still pillowed on the angel’s thigh.

“That’d be nice,” he says, staring into the darkened bathroom. He can see from here that the windowsill has still not been cleaned, that the angel has somehow amassed a few more bars of soap, another towel in a horrifying shade of pastel.

He can hear Aziraphale snap his fingers, and smell the sudden wet heat of a full bath.

“Can you manage yourself? I’ll go fetch you something to drink.”

It’s still dark in the bathroom, lit only by the gas-fired street-lamps outside the tiny window.

“Of course I can manage,” he says, not moving from his lap, wondering if he imagined the moment when Aziraphale said his eyes were beautiful.

“Whenever you’re ready,” the angel says, and if it’s a long time before Crowley gets up, he does not mention it.

* * *

At night, they’re gray.

The drifting, amorphous gray of overcast skies, of thunderclouds and bonfire smoke. Strong and nostalgic. A gray that follows you through centuries, remembers your name. A gray that makes promises to you in the dark, and keeps them in the morning.

This room is much smaller than he remembers— it is barely the length of his body from one wall to the next. It seemed much larger then— swallowed by the distances between them, the things unsaid. Perhaps it will feel larger with Aziraphale in it again, perhaps he will expand the space with the conversations they do not keep.

It’s empty now except for him, his body in the porcelain soaking tub and the multiple glittering bottles of sundry potions lining the bath wall. There are a few new additions along the dusty windowsill, backlit by the warm glow of gaslights outside.

He is somehow managing to be cold even here, up to his nose in bathwater that was miracled to stay hot.

“Crowley?”

There is the soft silhouette of an angel at the bathroom door, cups of some gently steaming liquid in his hands.

“Hallo, angel.”

“Why are you— Why aren’t the lights on?”

Crowley shrugs and then realizes that Aziraphale cannot see it.

“I didn’t realize they weren’t on, to be honest.”

“Oh, oh yes, I always forget—“ Aziraphale places the cups on a table by the door, pulls the tripod stool from its corner beneath the sink to the edge of the tub, “you can see in the dark.”

Crowley blows bubbles into the water.

Aziraphale’s hands are in his lap, rubbing circles into each other.

“So… so you can see me? Right now?”

The angel is looking somewhere near his face, finally landing on his eyes.

He can see the angel in perfect detail, the warm glowing edge of his face backlit by the gas lamps outside and the shine of moonlight off of the myriad reflective surfaces in the bathroom. He has brushed back his hair— taming the curls into some semblance of propriety, and Crowley wonders when he did it.

“I can,” he says softly.

“Oh,” the angel breathes, and Crowley is aware how this must feel like a confessional to him— robed in darkness while Aziraphale sat in full color, visible.

“You can turn the light on,” Crowley says.

“No, I… I think I like this.”

He can hear the angel swallow, can see his Adam’s apple bobbing too.

He knows that he is easier to love in the dark— in the dark where you can’t see the hard angles of himself, the hair colored by hellfire, the infected hue of his eyes. He knows it is easier to say things that you don’t mean in the dark, pretend that they meant nothing in the morning. He knows, too, that he will take any ounce of the angel that he can get, a dying man sipping at dewdrops, no matter how it debases him, flays open his heart with implication.

“Good,” Crowley says, “then I do too.”

Crowley lowers himself completely beneath the water, allows himself to be swallowed up by it.

He has always respected water— the way it moves simultaneously with furious intent and languid indecision. The way it will find the easiest path to its destination downward, eventually carve lines into things as immoveable as stone.

He should really get some holy water, he thinks. Just in case.

He surfaces to see Aziraphale with his fingers in the water, checking its temperature.

“Isn’t this a bit hot?” The angel asks, pulling his hand away.

“No such thing,” Crowley says, leaning back to stare up at the ceiling.

“How are you feeling?”

“Shitty,” he says, lolling his head over to stare at Aziraphale in the dark.

“Body aches?”

“I guess that’s one way of describing them.”

“Sore throat?”

Crowley swallows and tries to measure if the soreness there is from his human mouth being without drinking water for what probably amounts to days or whatever is causing this fever.

“A bit,” he says, sniffling, “I mostly just feel fucking exhausted.”

There is a hand reaching out toward him, and he moves into it, aware that Aziraphale probably cannot see where he starts and stops.

It feels along his cheekbone, then up to press against his forehead.

“I told you you’d get sick,” the angel mutters, and Crowley rolls his eyes.

“I was in that damned train car for _days_. I swear the guard kept coughing into the only window.” He leans into the hand along his forehead.

Aziraphale hums along in feigned agreement, pressing his knuckles into his cheeks.

“I don’t have any medicine here,” he murmurs, “if it would even help. And this bath water is so hot I can’t tell if it’s that or your fever breaking.”

“It’s not as though a fever can really damage me though, can it?”

Aziraphale pulls his hand away, looks somewhere at where his neck is.

“I don’t suppose it could— what with you being, oh how did you put it? Fireproof?”

The angel is smiling, and something inside of Crowley’s heart, buried under the chill of his skin, warms at the sight.

“I really missed you,” he says, and bites the inside of his cheek.

The angel pulls a towel down from the neat pile of them, bundles it into his chest.

“_Crowley_,” Aziraphale sighs.

“Why didn’t you come find me?”

The angel is picking at the looped threads of the Terry-cloth, staring down into his lap.

“You left in such a hurry, before,” he says softly, and Crowley watches his throat move as he swallows, “I thought perhaps you were still angry with me.”

_With you? With you? Never with you. At our circumstances maybe, at the invisible lines and the way they pull us into the future. But never at you._

“Angel,” he says quietly, “I wasn’t mad at you.”

He looks up even though Crowley knows he cannot see him.

“You weren’t?”

_How do I tell you that I could never be mad at you? You could smite me and I’d apologize for getting soot on your clothes._

“I wasn’t.”

“Then why did you—“

“I was embarrassed maybe. Ashamed of how much I— how much I—“

He suddenly cannot speak, his throat closing up around the words in his windpipe, the air in his lungs vanishing.

“It’s okay,” Aziraphale says, and then whispers, “don’t say it.”

His heart is throwing itself against the wall of his chest, beating so loud he is sure Aziraphale can hear it, has heard it this whole time.

“You don’t have to say it,” Aziraphale says, barely above a whisper.

Crowley nods into the water, closing his eyes.

_Because you feel it too?_ He wonders, lightheaded.

They sit in the warm silence for a long while, Crowley staring at the paint that is beginning to peel along the ceiling.

“Angel?” He asks the darkness.

“Yes?”

He inhales, trying to quell the furious beating of his heart.

“Do that thing again?” He asks, his voice small.

“What thing?” The angel says softly.

“When I was a snake— you kept putting your hand on my head. It was… nice.”

There is a pregnant pause, and Crowley has half a mind to cut his traitorous tongue out from his mouth, for always saying too much, too little, too many of the wrong things— but then Aziraphale’s hands are lifting to lace through his cropped hair, and he forgets to breathe.

“Like this?” Aziraphale asks quietly.

“_Yes_,” Crowley says, closing his eyes.

“This would be better if it were 33 AD again,” the angel says with a quiet, nervous laugh.

Crowley opens his eyes.

“Why 33 AD?” He asks, wondering what Jesus has to do with any of this.

It is silent for a long stretch of time— so long that Crowley begins counting the ticking of the antique clock in his bedroom, the passing of strangers beneath them on the street below.

Finally, from out of the darkness he can hear Aziraphale’s voice, smaller than it’s ever been:

“That was the last time you had very long hair.”

His heart begins a migration to his throat, his bloodstream flooding with a curious dose of adrenaline.

_You… remembered that?_

He isn’t quite sure what to say, how to tell the angel that if this is a confessional that he is a terrible priest.

“I did?” He breathes.

“You did,” the angel says.

“And you… remembered that?”

The fingers come down to rub just above his ear, along where he knows he has a scar from long ago, a remnant of the dark ages.

“I did,” Aziraphale whispers, “I do.”

Crowley isn’t sure if he has ever heard Aziraphale say those two words in isolated completion, if he has ever thought about those two words in respect to himself. And if he closes his eyes again and thinks about what those words sound like outside of this washroom confessional— perhaps at the end of an aisle, Aziraphale in white— he decides not to be too hard on himself, to let himself believe it’s just his fever inventing these dreams, drawing them up out of nothing.

He opens his eyes and looks at the gray outline of Aziraphale in the dark, praying— for the first time in his entire damned existence— that he is the kind of angel who makes promises in the dark, and keeps them in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> I just want you to know that if you leave me a comment that it fills me with a truly immeasurable joy (I mean, as long as it's a nice comment... seriously I am a literal jellyfish please don't poke me), and that I will end up reading it about a dozen times (maybe more). I'm sorry if I don't respond, just know that I cherish them.
> 
> As always, come talk to me on [Tumblr!](https://racketghost.tumblr.com)
> 
> I spend too much time on there. It's a problem.


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